Friday, August 5, 2011

GLAAD Rips NYT's Puff Piece On AFA

Yesterday I noted that the New York Times handled the vicious American Family Association with kid gloves in a profile that was almost glowing at times. Today GLAAD denounces the piece and its author. An excerpt:

Anti-gay activists claim that those judges “supported” marriage for gay and lesbian couples – a claim which Eckholm repeats here. But this is a gross mischaracterization. The truth is that those judges ruled that under the state constitution, the state could not legally prevent gay and lesbian couples from marrying. “Supporting” something and saying “it’s unconstitutional to ban” something are two very different statements, particularly when it comes to judicial rulings. By adopting AFA’s own claims here, Eckholm may as well have called them “activist judges.”

There are other instances of this too, like saying Home Depot supports “gay pride parades” instead of correctly pointing out that it supports the entire LGBT community. Why the focus on just parades? I have to assume that’s the language AFA uses, because that’s the image it wants to conjure up in its boycott calls. By adopting AFA’s slyly inaccurate language – and by mischaracterizing this disagreement as one between the AFA and “liberals” rather than between the AFA and an overwhelming majority of Americans – Erik Eckholm has done his audience and his newspaper a great disservice.